MEF producer Adriana Barbaro offers a look into the Commercialization of Childhood Project, an MEF film currently in production -- with an expected release date of late 2006/early 2007.

Today, the typical American child is immersed in a consumer culture that is unrivaled in history. Multitasking with media, using more than one medium at the same time, is now commonplace among young people; children are on the Internet instant messaging friends, surfing the web, on their cell phones, listening to their I-pods, and watching TV -- all at the same time. Estimated to influence over $500 billion in spending annually, children are the targets of multi-billion dollar industries selling everything from Tickle-Me-Elmo's to DVD players, cars, and vacations.

The Media Education Foundation is currently in production on a video that offers an in-depth examination of the commercialization of childhood. To this point, I have completed twelve interviews for the project. The topic is vast and there are many angles from which to approach it, but much of my focus has been on the practices that marketers employ to reach the youth market including: observing and videotaping children in their homes, on the streets, and in stores; having child psychologists on the payroll to help them analyze and then exploit children's physical and emotional vulnerabilities; and new delivery methods including stealth, guerilla, and peer-to-peer techniques, which enlist children to market to each other in chat rooms, at school, and even in their own homes.

To date I have interviewed Enola Aird (Director, The Motherhood Project), Josh Golin (Program Manager, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood), Diane Levin (Professor of Early Childhood Education, Wheelock College and author, Remote Control Childhood), Susan Linn (founder Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and author, Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood), Dr. Alvin Poussaint (Director, Judge Baker Children’s Center), Dr. Michael Rich (Director, Center on Media and Child Health Boston Children’s Hospital), Betsy Taylor (Founder and Director, Center for a New American Dream), Velma LaPoint (Professor of Human Development, Howard University), Dr. Michael Brody (Child Psychiatrist and Chair of the TV/Media Committee of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry), Robert Reiher and Daniel Acuff (Cofounders of Youth Market Systems Consulting and authors of Kidnapped: How Irresponsible Marketers are Stealing the Minds of Your Children), and Bernard Marshall (Child Psychiatric Specialist, Bay State Medical Center).

Many of the interviewees told me that marketers understand the importance of establishing early demand and are continually targeting children (at ever younger ages) with these methods, seeking out brand loyalty and 'cradle to grave' life-long customers. Marketers send children messages of entitlement and materialism, and promote an attitude that encourages children to adopt anti-adult values. Critics of these practices say all of these messages undermine children's healthy growth and development. Juliet Schor, author of Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture, who I will be interviewing for the project later this month, has conducted research that shows that the more involved children are in consumer culture, the higher their levels of anxiety, depression, and stress. Rates of childhood obesity and Type II diabetes are also increasing, and research cites media consumption as an important factor in these health issues.

In order to give our readers a behind the scenes look into the project, I am including a partial transcript of one of the interviews that has already been conducted. On March 15, 2006, I interviewed Enola Aird, founder and director of the Motherhood Project and Mothers' Council. An excerpt from the transcript of the interview follows.

Adriana Barbaro
MEF Producer

TRANSCRIPT

Adriana Barbaro: What has changed in youth marketing practices over the past couple of decades?

Enola Aird: Starting in 1980, several very important things changed. For one, the Congress of the United States, under pressure from advertisers and marketers, decided that they were going to take the Federal Trade Commission out of the business of regulating advertising and marketing to children. And lo and behold, a lot of really smart marketers discovered children as a huge market. James U. McNeil started writing about this phenomenon that marketers could actually begin to develop children as life-long consumers. So the philosophy becomes 'cradle to grave' -- "Let's get to them early. Let's get to them often. Let's get to them as many places as we can get them. And our goal is not just to sell them products and services, but to turn them into lifelong consumers."

It's also that it's a very comprehensive kind of no-holds-barred approach to getting at children by any means necessary. You have regular advertising, which we knew about, television and radio, and of course there is the Internet, but those are the obvious places. Advertisers today want to be part of "the fabric of children's lives." This is some of the language that they use. They want to be "wherever children are", "across the lifecycle", so zero to the time that they die. And so the result has been a firestorm of competition to get what they call "share of mind", to get this share of the demographic.

AB: Why are kids such a ripe demographic for marketers? What is the motivation for marketers to target children?

EA: Well, lo and behold, it's money. Number one, because parents are working and have a lot of disposable income, they're working and they sometimes feel guilty, they give children money so children have their own sources of income. They have their own spending and purchasing power. Secondly, they have tremendous ability to influence their parents' purchasing power, so you'll see advertisers for real big-ticket items like cars advertising to kids in ways that get their attention because they know that when the time comes to purchase a car, the kid is going to be there, the young person is going to be there, and they are going to be saying, "Hey, this car is better than this one," and so they know that children influence parenting purchases. And then, and this is the really important part, if they are able to get to children early enough, to really shape and cement their brand preferences, they are able to have children from zero to the end of their lives. So it is absolutely the most potentially lucrative demographic, and if you're looking at it purely from the standpoint of economics, it makes sense. If you have other interests at heart, like mothers do, it doesn't make sense and it's extremely dangerous.

AB: How is the line between meeting and creating consumer needs and desires increasingly being crossed by industries and their advertising and marketing to children?

EA: I think that the best example of that is the effort to get at babies. A baby is a baby. A baby has just arrived into the world. As a mother, I want my child to have a sense of joy and wonder and opportunity to explore, and, as he or she grows, to have a chance to have her imagination grow. The marketer is interested in getting that child at the very beginning -- to begin to shape that child's worldview, to begin to shape that child's brand preferences, to begin to basically tell the child in a sense what that child needs in order to have a meaningful life, in order to be a well-outfitted baby, et cetera. So I think that's the clearest example of advertisers trying to get to children at the earliest possible age, to try to shape them. And that's where we see, as mothers, the competition to us. That's our job, not theirs.

AB: Do you feel that the voluntary guidelines or self-regulation by the youth marketing industry offer enough protection to children?

EA: Absolutely not. We did a small study a couple of years ago of CARU, the Children's Advertising Review Unit, to try to get a sense, because every time everyone raises any concern about advertising and marketing and the evidence about harm to children's well-being, people say, "We've got it under control." People who work at the Children's Advertising Review Unit are focused on television and radio, traditional media. They have no authority by their own admission, no mandate from the industry that created them, to look at the new, more invasive and intrusive, forms of marketing that are so troublesome to all of us. The forms of marketing that try to get at kids surreptitiously -- in-school marketing, the long list of all the creative stuff, viral-marketing, very interesting ideas they come up with -- everything that comes into their imaginations that is a way to get at kids, they'll do. So viral-marketing, say hiring children who are very popular, who are going to be the leaders in their community, hiring them to promote their products, hiring them to do market research for them. . . CARU has no control over those really insidious forms of marketing.

It's an interesting thing for the industry to say they're engaged in self-regulation, but it's really a façade. I think it's increasingly clear that that is what it is, and we as mothers and other people who care about children have to somehow get it through to our legislative leaders that self-regulation is simply not working, and we need the help of the government to begin to rein in this incredible industry that really has, in a sense, lost control of itself. And the reason I say that is because a couple of years ago, when we were doing the study on CARU, we came across a survey that was done by an operation called Harris Interactive. It was an online survey of about 900 youth market workers, people who were in the industry who were doing advertising and marketing to children. The bottom line was that most of them agreed that they had gone too far. Most of them agreed that they were pressuring kids to nag their parents. Most of them agreed that they were advertising and marketing to children when they were too young to make sense of it, too young to make intelligent consumer choices. But they basically say the competition is too intense -- "We've got to get them at younger and younger ages because our competition is doing it." So they're caught up in a kind of vice-grip in this race to the bottom and they really and truly can't help themselves. Looking at that survey, I sort of felt sorry for them as human beings. They're in this industry. They're not evil people. They are trying to do the best they can, but the exigencies of the bottom line are pushing them to do things that they know are not right.

AB: Where should we draw the line on marketing to children?

EA: Let me answer the question from the standpoint of the marketers first. I don't think that marketers can draw the line. Since they've been given this open field, they've just really gone for it. It's in that sense in which I feel regulation could actually help them, because as this survey suggested, they're doing things that go against their best judgment in many cases. But they can't -- because of the exigencies of competition -- stop themselves. In a sense, I think regulation could save them from their worst selves. I don't think that they have a limit when you think about some of the things that they're doing. The American Academy of Pediatricians has said for a number of years now that advertising, programming on television, or media programming to young children, babies, under the age of two is really terrain that we probably ought not to go into. We ought to leave children be, at least for the early years of their lives. This is especially problematic when you attach the program to advertising and selling them products. Yet, for the last three or four years, we've seen a rush to get at babies. There has been a recognition that children as young as six months of age can recognize brands. So now if they can recognize brands, we need to make sure that they recognize our brand. Again there is this rush that they can't seem to restrain themselves.

Another example is that one of the things that marketers spend a lot of time doing is market research because they want to know what children's vulnerabilities are, what their weaknesses are, what their insecurities are, so that they can craft the right advertising messages that will make them feel like a loser -- so that without your product they're nothing, so they'll want your product. They spend a lot of time doing that market research. If I were at a university doing market research or research on a human being, I would have to go to the institutional review board, and they would have certain safeguards that the human beings under research would be treated the right way and that no harm would come to them as result of this research. Well, marketers don't have any of those constraints and without those constraints, they just keep going after kids. I was at a conference in the year 2000 and I sort of went in, snuck in, and paid my way. It was something called Play Time, Snack Time, Tot Time targeting preschoolers and their parents. It was a place at which people from some of the places you'd recognize -- Sesame Workshop and all -- were exchanging strategies, comparing notes about how to go after this new and potentially lucrative demographic. There was a woman there who was an anthropologist, and she was teaching everybody how to do participant observations on little kids and day care centers and scout troops, wherever you can find them. Her promotional material talked about how we can get a handle on children's hopes, their wishes, and their dreams. Not so we can help them realize those hopes, wishes, and dreams, but so we can sell them what we think that they need. Again, there is this failure, this inability, to restrain themselves.

AB: How would you respond to a marketer who would equate regulation to censorship?

EA: I would say, first of all, there is no absolute right to advertise. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission is in the business of regulating unfair and deceptive advertising. So if your advertising is unfair and deceptive, it gets to be regulated. So there is no absolute right there. Interestingly though -- and we can change this -- the FTC has more authority to regulate unfair and deceptive advertising to adults than it does to children, which is a ridiculous situation, but it is as a result of the congressional action, ironically titled the Federal Trade Commission Improvement Act of 1980, which actually took away from the Federal Trade Commission the authority to regulate advertising and marketing to children. So, there is no absolute right to do this. There is no right to advertise generally, and certainly in the case of children who have very special vulnerabilities, there ought to be no absolute right. But right now, there is an absolute right for advertisers and marketers to really run roughshod over them. I'm sure they're not intending to hurt our children, but they are. And if they're not able to restrain themselves I think we have to find ways to help them.

AB: How are marketers using paid child psychologists to reach children?

EA: One of my favorite quotes from an advertiser reads:

"Advertising at its best is making people feel that without their product you're a loser. Kids are very sensitive to that. . .You open up emotional vulnerabilities & it's very easy to do with kids because they're the most emotionally vulnerable."

That was said by Nancy Shalek, president of the Shalek Agency -- quoted in the LA Times. Now you would think that knowing about children's emotional vulnerabilities and insecurities and so on, that most responsible adults would take pains not to exploit those vulnerabilities. But in the case of advertisers, too many advertisers, this is really the very reason their business is in effect. They want to spend time understanding those vulnerabilities, understanding child development, understanding the child's need to belong, a child's need for community, a child's need for independence, a child's need to separate from parents. All those things are used by marketers and their battery of psychologists and anthropologists and sociologists and behavioral scientists, all who understand how children relate to the world. And their objective is to figure out how to get those insights and use them to create these products in the most effective way to encourage children to buy and also to figure out ways to undermine parental authority so that you can encourage children to get around, under, and through parents, to get to the buying.

AB: How are the commercial forces used by marketers to reach children pervasive, manipulative, and exploitive?

EA: They're pervasive because they're across the lifecycle. They start from zero. Now we can say there really is a kind of formal commitment on the part of advertisers and marketers to go after children at the earliest possible opportunity. So it is in fact zero through the end of the life cycle. If there is a place where kids are, you can be certain there are marketers trying to find ways to get to them. If your job is to turn children into lifelong consumers, you've got to make sure you are part of the fabric of their lives. You can’t give them much room to wiggle out. It's pervasive in that way. It's manipulative in the sense that children, particularly under the age of eight, have a great deal of difficulty understanding persuasive intent. They don't know that advertising is designed to get them to move in one direction or another. It's advertising that sort of overwhelms them in that sense. And it's exploitative because you've got the resources of multi-billion dollar corporations, the resources of really smart psychologists and behavioral scientists. You've got the resources of the media, which is pervasive and omnipresent. And you've got those resources also being used, deployed, to undermine parental authority. So you've got a really uneven playing field. We've got these really huge corporations and these poor kids who really don't even have the developmental wherewithal and capability to defend against these appeals. In that sense, I definitely think it is persuasive, manipulative, and exploitative, even predatory in a sense.

AB: In what ways are ads colonizing children’s spaces?

EA: I think we are getting to the place where there are very few spaces [for children without advertising], and I wonder what would be the space that advertisers and marketers would say no, that's sacrosanct, we're not going to go there. I really do wonder. Our children need spaces to wonder, to wander, spaces to imagine, spaces to play, spaces just to be at peace. Our children need that. The human spirit needs that. And with all this clamor, with all this constant selling chatter, I worry that our children don't have that. What does it mean that we're raising a generation, really for the first time in history, where from zero on there is nothing but chatter and clatter and a sense that everything has to be filtered through the media. And so our appeal to parents is -- we really have to find ways to give our children true real life, not virtual experiences. That's becoming more and more important, I think, to our children. It's always been important to our children's humanity, but we have so much competition now for that.

AB: Marketers, in their defense, will claim that parents have ultimate control over what media their children are exposed to and what purchases are made. Is this realistic? How would you respond to someone who says, "Where are the parents?"

EA: Well, for one thing, they're working. They're trying to make a living for their families. It's very interesting. I love this argument that they make, because it doesn't really make sense when you think about it. It's akin to an owner of a large fleet of trucks announcing that our fleet of trucks from now is going to be barreling down the road, especially where children are, at 150 miles an hour -- "Parents watch out. It's your job to take care that your children don't get hurt." No one would argue in that case that the owner of the fleet of trucks doesn't bear any responsibility at all. So, how can it be that companies that spend billions of dollars supporting their intention to raise children to be life-long consumers, using behavioral scientists to help them tap into children's vulnerabilities as well as to undermine parents so that parents kind of are not any longer a barrier to buying -- how can it be that they have absolutely no responsibility, especially since they themselves admit that they do pressure children to pester and nag their parents? On the face of it, I think it's a ridiculous argument. And also I think responsible adults would say that of course parents are responsible, but if children are not with their parents 24 hours a day, if they're in school and the school is full of advertising and marketing, if they go to daycare and the daycare center is full of advertising and marketing, if they're on the net, if someone's inviting them over for a slumber party, there is surreptitious selling or market research going on there. I think it's asking an awful lot of parents to take all the responsibility.

The thing we've forgotten as a culture is that we all have an interest in children. The "Watch Out for Children" signs -- and the reason we named our report Watch Out for Children -- suggested that drunk drivers had a responsibility to watch out for children. They wouldn't drive down the street and just say, "You know, you weren't watching out for your kid, I had to run them over." That doesn't make any sense. We've lost that sense in which all adults, responsible adults, have an interest whether my child has an opportunity to grow to be healthy and caring and productive. If for no other reason, that that child is going to be a worker, contribute to social security, that some of the heads of these corporations might collect on. That sense of interconnectedness is being undercut, almost precisely by the messages that advertising and marketing are promoting.

AB: What are the values that corporate America is marketing to kids? What is the impact on society?

EA: In doing our research, we came across a really neat quick summation of that value system -- it's "Got to have it. Give me." That's the value system. It includes self-indulgence, instant gratification, and materialism. It's "Got to have it. Give me." And that's the attitude that this marketer said, "We're trying to instill in people. That's the attitude we've managed to instill in young people." When you have young people who are kind of steeped and trained in self-indulgence, instant gratification, and materialism, you have sort of a weak foundation for people who could be really good friends, people who could be good romantic partners, people who could be good neighbors. When it's all about me 'a me-first-ism' -- I was in a train station a couple years ago, and I saw someone wearing a t-shirt that said, "The letter I comes before U." This whole attitude that it's me first, everybody else later, it suggests that we're moving into a kind of dog-eat-dog existence. That isn't the kind of place that I want my children and my grandchildren to grow up in. I think we have to be very mindful about what these values portend if we really want to kind of cultivate them, which is what the consumer mentality is. That's the basic consumer identity -- "It's about me, it's about me now, and it's about me and these things." That is not a good, strong foundation again to form relationships, to make sacrifices, to live in community, to be in a Democratic society, to have conversations about the very difficult issues we have facing us. How do we make compromises when it's all about me? It helps to sort of explain a lot about why we can't reach compromise in our political lives, why we can't have conversations that are civil. It does have negative implications for our ability to form relationships, our ability to form community to really build strong communities, our ability to have a robust Democratic life.

AB: How can we strike a better balance between the right of marketers to do business and the right of mothers and fathers to raise children free from a barrage of harmful advertising and marketing?

EA: To the statement, "This is America, this is capitalism," my answer to that as a mother is -- that's not the America that I want for my children. I want a better America. I want a place where our children can have some safe spaces, can have some places where they can develop their imaginations unmediated by the media. That's number one. We came up with a Mother's Code for Advertisers that hasn't gotten very far, but what we said there was that children are extremely vulnerable and cannot understand persuasive intent, especially children under the age of eight. We think that a better balance would be to say we're not going to advertise to children under the age of eight. We'll advertise to their parents, but we won't advertise to them. We think that it's just incredible that we allow market researchers to go into schools, to daycare centers, and just sort of muck around with children to find out about their hopes and dreams so that they can find out ways to manipulate children. That ought to be outlawed. That would be a good faith way of saying, wait a minute, we're trying to recalibrate here. We think there ought not to be advertising and marketing in schools. Schools are places for the life of the mind. When we allow commerce into the schools, we're saying, first of all we can't pay for your education without doing it this way, which is a sad commentary on adulthood, but we're also saying that this kind of bizarre mentality is just part of the way life is. You can't have any safe space. You can't have any freedom for a pure life of the mind. That should not be acceptable.

We also think that advertisers and marketers, if they want to be responsible, ought to try to reduce their sponsorship of gratuitously violent and gratuitously sexual programming. We know that this is not creating a good ecology for our children. Those are some of the suggestions that we had. Obviously, that was a quixotic overture, but we continue to think that we ought to be giving our children the benefit of the doubt. When there is a concern about whether or not children are being harmed, when there is a possibility that children are being harmed, we ought to give our children the benefit of the doubt, instead of businesses. We're just saying, advertise to the parents, who are in a better position to defend against your commercial appeals or are in a better position to evaluate your advertising and your marketing messages.

AB: What actions need to be taken to start to de-commercialize children’s childhood experience?

EA: Certainly for parents, I think that it is very important for them to be aware. Getting the word out is so important. It's not just the commercials. We need to think about this as part of a larger challenge that corporations have put to us. They have decided that they have a better idea of how our children should be raised, what values they should have, and they're very busily trying to put that idea into place. We need to call attention to what's going on so we can defend against that on behalf of our children. We need to look at our homes, sort of doing internal inspections and audits of ourselves, and the ways in which we're living and the degree to which we are buying into those values that are so potentially harmful to our children. One of the things we wanted to do was to call mothers to form communities of resistance, to get together with neighbors, to try to find out what's going on in your schools. Is there advertising in your schools? Is there some way that you can begin to fight that? Is there advertising in your daycare center? Is there advertising in your church? Increasingly, we are getting appeals from the pulpit that are commercial in nature. To begin to say, listen guys, what's going on here is really problematic on a number of levels in terms of the messages we are sending to our children.

In terms of what Congress can do to help, it can undo, first of all, the action that it took in 1980, taking away from the Federal Trade Commission the authority to regulate advertising and marketing to children. That's really important. It's really shameful that advertising and marketing to adults is more regulated than advertising and marketing to children. It is not a morally tenable position. We are very grateful to Senator Tom Harkin who has introduced legislation in the context of the obesity discussion to get the FTC back into that business. The FTC ought to be in that business. We need to have a full-scale Congressional hearing that looks at this explosion in advertising and marketing to children since 1980. What happened? Get Jim McNeil in here and talk to him about what advertisers are doing. Subpoena the advertisers to come in and talk about their strategies. Subpoena their internal documents, so we really understand what this 'cradle to grave' philosophy is all about and how they're implementing it. What, if any, harm is being caused? Let's look at that evidence that's being amassed by people who care and really take that seriously. We ought to have a limit on research with young people and, at a minimum, research in the market context ought to be treated in just the same way that research in the academic context is. There ought to be some kind of institutional review board, some kind of third party mechanism set up, to make sure that the children who are subjects of this research are protected.

Finally, here's my mothers, again, quixotic suggestion. In the environmental movement there is something called the precautionary principle, the idea that if there is evidence of harm or a risk of harm to human well-being, we ought to be cautious. That is very similar to my notion that we ought to err on the side of protecting our children. We ought to give our children the benefit of the doubt as opposed to giving businesses the benefit of the doubt. The precautionary principle would basically try to reverse the burden of proof, and put it not on the parents to say, "Oh my gosh, you're really hurting my kids, your trucks are speeding down the road and killing my kids." The burden would not be on us to protect, but the burden would be on the actors, the people who are trying to advertise and market to our children. There is a lot of skepticism about that, and people say, "You want to stop progress." No, what we want to do is protect children. We want to begin to introduce that precautionary principle which has been introduced in the environmental context and in a number of cities as we have begun to play around with the idea of planning in a way that is truly mindful of the health and well-being of people. In this case, I would like to see that principle applied to being truly mindful of the health and well-being of children before we allow people to undertake these grand experiments. Advertising and marketing to babies the minute they come out of the womb -- that ought to be unacceptable until we have some very good evidence that it's not going to cause harm. At a minimum we ought to have an opportunity for real reflection about what has happened. There has been this incredible explosion in advertising and marketing to children. How, if at all, are our children being hurt? What is the evidence? And what can we do immediately to protect children, particularly those who are really, really young who are now in the sights of advertisers and marketers?

AB: Do you have hope for changing the industry?

EA: You always have hope when you're a mother, because you've got these children for whom you're responsible. My appeal to mothers and fathers and to people who care about children is look beyond the assertions that this is just about advertising and marketing, that this is just about products. This is about a lifestyle. It's about a worldview. It's about a point of view. It's about people wanting to convince our children that life is about buying, life is about getting, life is about me, and those are messages that are diametrically opposed to what life is really about. Life is about each other, which is about sharing, finding ways to care about each other and build strong communities and strong relationships. And if we care about nourishing the human spirit, if we care about human relationships, we've got to care about this issue.

Enola G. Aird is an activist mother. She is currently an Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for American Values, where she founded and directs the Motherhood Project. The mission of the Motherhood Project is to put motherhood on the national agenda and foster a renewed sense of purpose, passion, and power in the vocation of mothering in both the public and private spheres. She is also the convener of the Mothers' Council, a group of mothers of diverse backgrounds and political views, which has set as one of its main objectives "to inspire mothers to fight to change our toxic culture, rather than adapt to it."
Enola was born in the Republic of Panama and is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Barnard College and received her law degree from Yale University. After eight years in corporate law practice, Enola left the work force to devote her time to her children. Through her experiences at home, she learned first-hand of the extent to which mothering is devalued in American culture. This led her away from the practice of law to a new vocation as an activist mother -- committed to fighting for the best of all possible worlds for children and the mothers and fathers who raise them. She was appointed by Governors O'Neill and Weicker to the Connecticut Commission on Children and elected Chair by its members, and worked for two years at the Children's Defense Fund, serving as director of its violence prevention program and acting director of its Black Community Crusade for Children.